On the Grid, Secure and Private.

Investments in Blockchain Technology Continues to Accelerate

According to a report from International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide spending on blockchain solutions reached $2.1 billion in 2018 so far, compared with $945 million spending in 2017. IDC expected that the total blockchain spending will reach $9.2 billion by 2021, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 81.2 percent. The report indicated that the United States sees the biggest investment in blockchain technology, accounting more than 40 percent of the total spending. While Western Europe, China and Asian/Pacific region are expected to become the next largest region for blockchain spending. DMG Blockchain Solutions Inc. (OTC: DMGGF), International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Pareteum Corporation (NYSE: TEUM), BTL Group Ltd. (OTC: BTLLF), HIVE Blockchain Technologies Ltd. (OTC: HVBTF)

Increasing adoption of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies is one of the factors that attract worldwide spending on blockchain solutions. Jessica Goepfert, program director, Customer Insights & Analysis, said, “There are a multitude of potential new use cases for blockchain, as transactions and records are the lifeblood of just about every organization. However, we are seeing initial blockchain spending to transform existing highly manual and inefficient processes such as cross-border payments, provenance and post transaction settlements. These are areas of existing pain for many firms, and thus blockchain presents an attractive value proposition.”

DMG Blockchain Solutions Inc. (OTC: DMGGF) also listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the ticker ‘DMGI’. Earlier today the company announced breaking news that, “acquisition of Datient Inc., doing business as “Blockseer” (the “Transaction”). As now Blockseer becomes part of the DMG family, Blockseer is the best capitalized Blockchain analytics team in the industry. This provides DMG the opportunity to lead in cryptocurrency forensics and proprietary real-time risk scoring to block potential bitcoin transactions from being used for nefarious purposes including money laundering. Additionally, Blockseer’s world-renowned blockchain and data analytics expertise provides the capabilities to uniquely offer class-leading enterprise solutions with a natural convergence of Blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies – data is the asset, which can be tracked and monetized utilizing blockchain technology.

Blockseer is a blockchain and artificial intelligence company headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. Blockseer has worked with several law enforcement agencies including the U.S. Secret Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Internal Revenue Services and also provides Ethereum blockchain data services for blockchain.info, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency wallet providers. Blockseer provides data analytics and incorporates artificial intelligence to provide intelligence into what is happening with digital currencies and blockchains in real-time.

Blockseer’s current team comes from Stanford, Harvard, University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon and Columbia with deep experience in artificial intelligence, big data, and blockchain. It is led by its Chief Executive Officer and founder, Danny Yang and its advisory board includes Charlie Lee, the founder of Litecoin.”

“Blockseer has strong assets, top-tier customers including blockchain.info and a technical team that will support DMG with its blockchain platforms and projects. We are excited to continue to grow the company and with the addition of the Blockseer team we are confident that we have a well-diversified company to provide cryptocurrency mining, mining-as-a-service, forensics, and the development of blockchain platforms,” said Daniel Reitzik, CEO and Director of DMG.

Chris Filiatrault, DMG’s Chairman and founder added, “With my contacts in Japan, we look forward to bringing Blockseer to the Japanese market.”

International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) is recognized as the leading enterprise blockchain provider. On January 16, 2018, the company and Maersk announced their intent to establish a joint venture to provide more efficient and secure methods for conducting global trade using blockchain technology. The aim of the new company will be to offer a jointly developed global trade digitization platform built on open standards and designed for use by the entire global shipping ecosystem. It will address the need to provide more transparency and simplicity in the movement of goods across borders and trading zones. The cost and size of the world’s trading ecosystems continues to grow in complexity. More than $4 trillion in goods are shipped each year, and more than 80 percent of the goods consumers use daily are carried by the ocean shipping industry. The attributes of blockchain technology are ideally suited to large networks of disparate partners. A distributed ledger technology, blockchain establishes a shared, immutable record of all the transactions that take place within a network and then enables permissioned parties access to trusted data in real time. By applying the technology to digitize global trade processes, a new form of command and consent can be introduced into the flow of information, empowering multiple trading partners to collaborate and establishing a single shared view of a transaction without compromising details, privacy or confidentiality.

Pareteum Corporation (NYSE: TEUM) is a rapidly growing Cloud Communications Platform company. Last month, the company announced that it has published a whitepaper to explore the opportunities that Blockchain enables including security, identity management and settlement. The whitepaper begins with defining how Blockchain supports the integration of various forms of traditional and next generation payment models. Providing real-world use cases, the whitepaper demonstrates how Blockchain relates to the communications market. Ali Davachi, Chief Technology Officer comments, “Pareteum is focused on delivering enabling technology to all of its partners. The TEUM Blockchain (TBC) will revolutionize how our customers leverage Blockchain technology. Enabling our SaaS platform with identity management, transaction settlements and payment solutions greatly expands the opportunity for our customers.”

BTL Group Ltd. (OTC: BTLLF) is an enterprise technology platform provider that is developing Interbit, a proprietary next generation blockchain platform. On January 21, 2018, the company provide further information on the next phase of its previously announced European energy trading project, under which four oil and gas supermajors and five leading energy traders including Eni Trading & Shipping, Total, Gazprom Marketing & Trading Limited, Mercuria, Vattenfall, Petroineos and Freepoint, propose to participate in using BTL’s Interbit blockchain platform to deliver gas trading reconciliation through to settlement and delivery of trades. This enterprise solution is being called OneOffice and is a revenue generating project for BTL. Interbit, as a next generation blockchain platform, has the capacity to operate and interconnect many thousands of blockchains per server, in a secure, private and scalable manner and moreover is designed for ease of use.

HIVE Blockchain Technologies Ltd. (OTC: HVBTF) recently announced its results for the third quarter ended December 31, 2017. Subsequent to the quarter, on January 15, 2018, HIVE commenced mining operations from the initial 6.8 MW phase of the Sweden GPU Data Centre, nearly tripling its global footprint of energy consumption dedicated to digital currency mining to 10.6 MW. This has contributed to a strong increase in the Company’s digital currency portfolio to a total value of $13,624,783 as at February 26, 2018. The construction and configuration of the second and third phases of the Sweden GPU Data Centre is proceeding on-schedule and will increase HIVE’s capacity by an additional 13.6 MW within two months, with the 20.0 MW Sweden Bitcoin Date Centre to follow by September 2018. In the quarter, HIVE acquired and launched operations of the second phase at its digital currency mining centre in Iceland. Included in the financial results for the quarter ended December 31, 2017 is a full quarter of operations from the initial 2.05 MW of mining capacity plus operations from the 1.75 MW expansion from October 13, 2017 which, combined, resulted in revenues of $3,274,186 and a gross mining margin of $2,382,687. HIVE continues to execute on its aggressive growth strategy to maintain its position as a market leader in the blockchain infrastructure industry and is fully financed to build out and bring online the balance of the Sweden GPU Data Centre by April 2018 and the Sweden Bitcoin Data Centre by September 2018.